Jeff Clanon

Jeff Clanon is a founding consultant member and former Director of Partnership Development for SoL, The Society for Organizational Learning. SoL evolved from the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT where Jeff was the Executive Director for five years. He has over 30 years’ experience in the area of individual and organizational learning, having held positions as a clinical psychologist, organization development consultant, business manager, and educator. He is currently an independent leadership coach and organizational consultant, based in Boston, MA, certified to use the Leadership Agility 360.

At SoL, Jeff worked with private and public sector organizations such as Shell, Nissan, Ford, AT&T, Boeing, and the US Department of Defense, and with researchers and other consultants to discover, teach, and implement effective practices in the area of organizational learning. He is particularly interested in how senior leaders can take a systemic approach to create and sustain work environments that facilitate learning, tap intrinsic motivation and generate effective, collaborative action.

Jeff’s clients include American International Schools (in India, Germany, and the Netherlands), Duke Corporate Education, Massachusetts Department of Health, NASA, the National Security Agency, the US Department of Education, William Grant, and the World Bank Group.

Dorothy Hutt

A leadership coach, trainer, and consultant, Dorothy Hutt is President of the Collaborative Leadership Institute in Ottawa, Ontario. Since 1995, she has designed and facilitated experiential programs that have helped leaders, teams and most recently, leadership cultures, transform their effectiveness. Her approach in guiding these leadership development and leadership culture transformations is based on Leadership Agility’s integral framework. She has an excellent track record working with a wide range of corporate and government clients.

Dorothy’s clients report that she brings an exceptional level of integrity, listening, and insight that sheds light on deeply engrained habits that are worth changing, because they hinder collaborative leadership and sustained success. She inspires broader thinking, wiser action, shared responsibility, and collaboration in addition to individual achievement. Her current work builds on more than 25 years of management experience in large companies and as an entrepreneur. Dorothy has a Master’s degree in Transpersonal Psychology and was certified as a Professional Coach by New Ventures West in 2000. She is also a certified LA360 coach.

Stephen Josephs

Stephen Josephs’ 25-year executive coaching practice grew through decades of training and research. He is especially skilled at helping clients use the immediate challenges they face as opportunities to expand their capacity to lead. This helps them achieve not only their desired business results, but also an increased satisfaction with work and home life. In his work with groups, Steve specializes in developing cohesive and collaborative teams that communicate in ways that build productive work environments.

Stephen’s research on performance began in the 1970s, when he founded the Massachusetts Institute of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP is a cognitive-behavioral method for understanding and improving performance. Stephen used this approach to “model” exemplary leaders, identifying the implicit thought processes that allow them to outperform others by significant margins. He then went on to create performance models for business communication, with applications in the areas of leadership, management, team-building, sales, and customer service. A skilled performer himself (classical guitar and improvisational theater), Stepehn draws on his unique talents to help groups and individuals communicate the best of what they have to offer.

Charlotte Kells

Charlotte Kells is a seasoned organizational consultant and group facilitator specializing in process facilitation, creative problem solving, strategic planning, mediation, and custom training. She is also a deeply experienced executive coach with certifications in the Leadership Agility 360, Leadership Effectiveness Analysis (LEA), the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and other instruments. She has extensive experience facilitating large-scale visioning and planning forums and facilitating teams formulating and implementing strategic business initiatives.

Charlotte’s 20+ years in the consulting field build upon 7 years of Director and VP-level management experience in the financial services industry. In addition, she served for 10 years on the faculty at the Creative Problem Solving Institute in Buffalo, New York, teaching their program in Facilitating Creative Leadership. She has Masters degrees in Education and Business Management from Lesley College and the University of Michigan.

Hermann Küster

Hermann Küster is a coach, consultant, and trainer in the field of advanced leadership development and corporate culture diagnosis and development. He has more than a decade of experience in helping managers transform their leadership skills. His transformative approach directly addresses the underlying dynamics at the macro level (organizational system) and micro level (personality system), producing sustainable results which usually reach well beyond the scope of the original problem.

Originally trained as a physicist, Hermann ended a longtime leadership position in big science (elementary particle physics research) to investigate the development of individuals and organizations.Since 2003 he has trained coaches and consultants in transformative coaching approaches.

Hermann lives in Hamburg, Germany,and has worked for Daimler, Dräger Medical, Barmer, Credit Suisse, Abbott, CSC, and other companies.

Virginia Swain

Through the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL), Virginia Swain has over twenty years’ experience as a coach and consultant to emerging and seasoned leaders, teams and organizations. She has a specialty in introducing change, dialogue and healthy responses to conflict in resistant systems. The IGL mission is to provide confidential, compassionate, and skilled guidance to help leaders and teams move through change, challenges and crises, recognizing all human beings, institutions, and multilateral entities for their uniqueness, need, and capacity for transformation. Virginia’s large system change and community-building experience in the United Nations is noteworthy in addition to her experience as a human resources and marketing senior executive for Pepperidge Farm, a division of Campbell Soup Company.

Virginia has been an adjunct professor at seven colleges teaching executive career management, global management, negotiation, mediation, leadership, change management, business management, and cross-cultural conflict management. She is experienced in systems thinking approaches to organization and leadership development and in diversity—with specializations in addressing conflict and gender, racial and ethnic divides.

Our award-winning book, Leadership Agility, clearly describes the inner capacities and core competencies of highly agile leaders. With over twenty real-life stories, it also identifies the five stages or levels that managers move through to master leadership agility.

Written in an engaging, down-to-earth style, this ground-breaking book is designed as a roadmap that tells you how to bring increased agility to the initiatives you take every day — whether you want to improve working relationships, develop your team, or change your organization.

This 29-page white paper tells the story of an executive team that transformed themselves and their business by learning a new approach to high-impact conversations. It provides a detailed inside view of the learning process that takes place in our Pivotal Conversations Learning Lab.

The Leadership Agility white paper is essentially an executive summary of the book. It clarifies why agility has become essential to leadership effectiveness, outlines the levels of agility described in the book, identifies the four kinds of agility needed for successful leadership initiatives, and provides tips for increasing your leadership agility and helping others do the same.

The Leadership Agility Thought-Letter takes you beyond what you'll find in the book. It provides you with applications of Leadership Agility principles and methods that you can use every day, plus updates about Leadership Agility resources.